Told you so: Civ 6 really has been in development all this time, and Firaxis Games and 2K finally announced the game today. As expected, it’s coming out later this year and, as iDigitalTimes predicted , development is being led by Ed Beach, who designed the excellent Civ V expansions. And that means we’re in the clear: Unlike vanilla Civ V, Civilization VI could be a really great game right from the outset. It’s dodging the mistakes of its predecessor.

Civilization VI Features: To Make Right What Once Went Wrong

Civilization V is the most successful game in the Civilization series. But, if you’re a hardcore strategy gamer, it’s manifestly worse than its predecessor, the aptly named Civilization IV. The vanilla version of Civ V lost most of the features of the final version of Civ IV, which isn’t uncommon for iterative strategy games. But it also lost a great deal of the complexity. Religion and espionage disappeared. Diplomacy and culture were both altered in sweeping ways that sounded good on paper, but in practice were a bit dumbed down. Happiness changed the basic dynamic for expanding an empire, creating perverse incentives toward Infinite City Sprawl. The resource system, coupled with happiness, destroyed most of the incentives toward creating a large empire. Don’t get me wrong, the game had great features—but it lost much of what made Civ IV an incredible, nuanced strategy game.

This wasn’t lost on the hardcore Civ community. Sulla, one of its most prominent members, wrote a long essay on how the game’s features reduced its overall complexity. The lead designer of Civ V even repudiated some of those same features. The game was still hugely popular, and for good reason—it was way more accessible to new fans. It just lost that hard strategic edge.

Well, it’s coming back with Civilization VI. The lead designer of Civ V left after the vanilla version launched, and the two expansions changed the game’s course. They still had to work around those initial systems, but they added in new complexity, changed some of the more restricting strictures, and made the game much more nuanced. Those two expansions were designed by Ed Beach, lead designer of Civ VI.

Civilization VI is going to take the good parts of Civ V and build on them further. As Beach told Gameinformer. Civ VI isn’t starting from scratch. It uses the completed Civ V, with the excellent expansions, as the new baseline, and then builds from there—even while it changes some of the parts that weren’t working. Of course, we don’t have all the details yet. But it’s extremely promising. Civilization VI doesn’t start over again. And it’s being led by the steady hand of the man who saved Civ V.